One day a Floridan flew up into the sky by attaching helium-filled weather balloons to his folding aluminum lawn chair. He carried an air rifle (BB gun) so he could pop a few balloons when he wished to descend once more to earth. The Floridan nearly froze but lived to tell about it.

WEATHER BALLOONS ARE A CUBIC PACE in volume, allowing some neck for expansion. A two-step, roughly 5 foot, pace is 100 pinks and you can imagine a cubic pace volume as a square pace on the ground and about as high as a person. 100 cubed is a million and the balloon's volume is a million cubic pinks. HOW MANY BALLOONS DID HE NEED TO TIE ONTO THE CHAIR?

Meterheads please work this (messily of course) in old-fashioned metric units for comparison. This will show the new units to advantage.

Answer: at normal conditions of 2.2 grade and 2.2 ocque per sq.pink a cubic pink volume contains 10^20 molecules of gas. So a balloon contains 10^26 molecules. This is just the PV=nkT law.

An air molecule has on average 29 heavy particles and a helium has 4, each weighing 1/13 x 10^-27 talent as usual. And so the difference per molecule is 25/13 x 10^-27 talent, which means that per balloon it is 25/13 x 10^-1 talent. Each balloon when filled with a cubic pace of helium can lift 2.5/13 talents.

The chair and passenger however have mass equal to 5 talents. Five divided by 2.5/13 is 26. It therefore requires TWENTY-SIX BALLOONS TO LIFT THE FLORIDAN.